Lesbian a banned Facebook page username word

Since we posted in fury at being unable to have a username @listening2lesbians for our Facebook page, we discovered that many words are banned.

What’s particularly interesting is the list of what is and isn’t banned, particularly around sexuality.

Lesbian is the only group in the LGBTIQA community who is point blank banned.

This time we screen capped it all for clarity and proof.

Lesbian is a banned word:

But all of these other labels are allowed:

The word gay is fine.

Gay women are also kindly permitted:
The word sexual itself is banned

But, bi, biwomen,and bicurious are allowed:

Questioning is fine:

Queer is fine:

Intersex is fine:

Trans, transman, transmen, transwoman and transwomen are all permitted:

Broad terms are fine:

We wondered about words used both as insults and identity and dyke is allowed but faggot is banned.

Tellingly, hetero is permitted but homo itself is not:

Lastly the suggestion was made to us that lesbian was perhaps banned because it’s used as a pornography category. Not only would this be the wrong response to fetishising women but it’s also not accurate since the word porn is totally fine according to Facebook username criteria.

So there you have it. Lesbian is banned when others are not. Only homo and faggot were also banned.

Does this mean Facebook thinks the word lesbian is itself an insult or is it a case of deliberate discrimination and silencing?

Side note: we put our username in capitals and used an lowercase l for the I to get our username so it is @llstening2lesblans but it looks ok in uppercase as @LISTENlNG2LESBlANS. We couldn’t bring ourselves to drop the word lesbian.

We were keenly aware of the irony of listening also being banned in Facebook page usernames but in the few days since we originally posted this seems to have changed as per the pictures below.